Christian Bouchard was born amidst the turmoil of the revolutionary year of 1968, when students and workers of the Old World raged against the rulers of Europe, and while the U.S.A. was torn apart by the Vietnam War.

Bouchard released his premier recording in 1995; a prepared guitar venture. Simultaneously, he dispersed his first attempts at electroacoustics. This proved successful, and he went on to studies with Yves Daoust. Bouchard has of late been awarded several prizes for his electroacoustics.

The first work on this empreintes DIGITALes CD is Angle mort; a recent piece completed in 2002. The subtitles regarding the sequence of sounding events tell a story in themselves: Duel-1; Accident; Duel-2; Morphinic Night; Transfer; Microscopic Cohabitation / Scattered Memories — and the dedication gives it away too: “To my bike-riding friend”.

These titles remind me of an August Strindberg short story, in which a man who has just lost his wife to illness and death reads through a paper of notes all the way from the engagement to the marriage to the wife’s death and the funeral arrangements; a whole life and existence summed up by short notes on a piece of paper.

Christian Bouchard explains that he to begin with aimed at a sound world that would picture the struggle between viruses and antibodies as well as the sounds a patient would pick up at intensive care, with all the machinery around him in his dreamy state of sedation. As Bouchard was working with this, he received the news of a friend’s motorcycle accident, which threw the sound process in a somewhat different direction.

The sound sources are submitted in Bouchard’s linear notes: “electronic sounds, oral noises, breathing, crowds, lifts, street corners, mechanical objects”.

The work commences in a spur of cut-up white noise, splices of electronic rumbles and aural atmospheres that appear almost percussive in their sudden appearances and disappearances, as if the world was turned off and on at the whim of a child of God, playing in the nursery of the universe. It could also be mistaken for a little techno unit so and so — but it’s a different story!

Bouchard’s cut-ups work. He doesn’t keep them up too long, but simply lets the lightning-fast excisions swoop past in precipitous angles that leave you ducking and dodging until reality starts filling up your consciousness with a seeping, wheezing fog of moist audio. It’s a more constant flow of oxygen finding its way up your nostrils and deep inside your auditory meatuses.

As the action gets more intense, hammering down on your nerve-ends in a vibrating hell-hound breath, sounds out of a human oral cavity drools down your listening like honey down a spoon you just lifted out of a jar…

As the piece progresses, it appears to lift you up by the neck like a kitten, speeding you through a shaman state of mind, in which secrets of life and the world are presented to you in a sonically transformed, symbolic kind of way, as in some of the most Stockhausenesque Stockhausen works (Oktophonie, Kathinkas Gesang), or like in Rolf Enström’s brilliant shaman electroacoustic work Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise (Prix Italia 1987!), wherein Jonas Edvard Steggo’s Saami yoik (recorded on site in 1952) naming the two Lapland mountain peaks is turned around into another, hitherto invisible (unheard!) realm, wherein the shaman travels to the beyond and back with you, the listener, in a steady grasp.

Bouchard manages the same notion, albeit with the victim of the motorcycle accident as the traveler, levitated out of his gravitational position in the midst of all that intensive care equipment, floating under the ceiling with all those hoses and tubes hooked up, looking like the source of life floating in weightlessness, being tapped by an alien breed, and the concrete walls of the gigantic hospital suddenly transparent like the lungs of a fish grasping for air on the pier, the whole building an organism full of cellular activity and flowing fluids of necessities, as the gravitational conversations go on between celestial bodies in deep space…

Flakes of memories drift by, familiar voices disguised in phase shifts, childhood fears magnified, a father that reaches to the sky, his hat up there blocking the sun, the creaking of the baby carriage tearing the world apart…

Sounds of traffic and cafeterias bring adulthood and meager spirituality; the meaningless gestures of day-to-day curling back as a curse… and the beeping of life-supporting hi-tech reaches the mind in a mimicry of Terry Riley organs, feed-back and all, finally reducing existence to its bare core; a singularity of pain and pleasure and all the states in between, from a root canal to an orgasm in an instant.

Piece number 2 (tracks 2 — 4) is Trois miniatures en suite from 1997 — Bouchard’s first digitally produced electroacoustic work, which was made from a set of rules concerning duration and other aspects. For example, the composer is instructed to “look for soundscapes bearing the traces of the human activity that will be the only material for a miniature. Include the complete selected samples at least once.”

Bouchard made three pieces according to these instructions, here presenting them as a suite.

The first miniature is called Sacréboules, which mixes a passing airplane with two Chinese balls rolling, plus the sounds of a brook.

The second one is Le point de vue du parcomètre, which Bouchard calls a “superimposition of soundscapes from a single point of view.”

Thirdly Bouchard presents Tonicité “for base material, a single sound take.”

Sacréboules sounds different from what the description suggests. It opens in a prickly, hardly audible, high-pitch, randomly percussive mood, perhaps an electronically transformed flow of water over rocks and pebbles (the brook), but this cannot be determined save by the confirmation of the composer, should you ask him. These sharp, beautifully trickling triangle sounds soon are accompanied by a harsh and overwhelmingly brutal, dark noise (probably the airplane), wherein the triangle sounds take on the shape of church bells which in turn bend into some sage bell bulgings from undersea consciousnesses, withdrawing into a sound world reminiscent of Pierre Henry’s Le Livre des Morts égyptien, which however is based on manipulated grand piano sounds.

At the end the live shot of reality is revealed. Quite an exiting piece, extremely cleverly organized! This is true, vibrant, artistic sound wizardry! Many should listen and learn here! It is in the handling of small means and short durations that the true artist is revealed.

Le point de vue du parcomètre immediately appears to be dealing with time — or perhaps the illusory measuring of time… You hear a clock being wound and the ticking of wristwatches, on a backdrop of church bells… but it’s like trying to grasp the air in your hand och running for the end of the rainbow; simply a malfunction of our way of thinking, of our way of organizing existence in our mind; a wrongly formulated question.

Atmospheres of human societies rise in the soundscape, echoing in town mall reverberations or subway station environments, as the true nature of time looses us in a 300 000 kilometer per second flyby… constituting an aspect of space, wherein gravity is mere curved time, and our fates are smeared out on the walls of the time-space continuum like God-given graffiti…

The third part of Trois miniatures en suite — Tonicité — opens in the raw, natural vicinity of a backing dump truck, and the traffic aspect keeps up in it’s identifiable shape for a short while, until a softly panning, very benevolent and pleasurable sound soothes you and your comrades on this journey of lives…

The soaring sensation keeps up, in a laid-back flow of time and distance, albeit after a while reminiscent of the horrendous but spiritually enlightening Ligeti -flight of 2001 — a Space Odyssey — which in fact was a shaman journey not unlike the one Rolf Enström pictures via Jonas Steggo’s yoik in Tjidtjag & Tjidtjaggaise, mentioned above.

This, again, proves the brilliance of Christian Bouchard’s performance. It’s quite unlikely for anyone to be able to chisel such a wondrous and spiritually provoking piece of sound art out of such a meager source material — but Bouchard manages! Congratulations! This really livens me up!

Parcelles (2002 — 2003) comes in two sections, the first on tracks 5–11, the second on tracks 12–16.

Bouchard has a way with words, too, explaining quite poetically the aim of Parcelles. Please go to his page at empreintes DIGITALes’ site to read his whole statement. However, some of what he says boils down to the fact that he is fascinated by “magical moments” found in his sound environments, and that he tries to record those and utilize them in his art, much like a painter catches “landscapes, abstract forms” etcetera, filtering them through his personality, through his frames of reference. He calls them “fragments of moments”.

Bouchard meticulously submits the sources of Parcelles: Iron brake out my window — Sirens-Children in the nearby park — Fill in the Crier at the Montréal Festival — Secrets of a Stranger in Brussels; St Michel’s Cathedral — Noon Comings and Goings at Saint-Malo/Intra muros — Waiting for the Boeing in Paris/the Concorde — To All Passers-by, Thanks!; very close to my mics — And It Was So Quiet; between two cars — Leap-piano, Child’s Play, at a Jazz Festival — Noted Landscape at La Malbaie — Saint-Laurent Boulevard — A Fragment of Solitude at Orly.

The iron brakes out Bouchard’s window are turned into a bronze age lure in a mystical veil of age and dreamy textures — and thus it goes on through the entire Parcelles work, both parts; surprising utilizations and manipulations of windows in time, slices of reality taking on their hidden characteristics in fluent, poetic presentations that say something more and different than what is apparent just through the sum of the sounding parts — and therein lies the brilliance, the true quality of this sound art, which charms me more than most things I’ve heard lately. I can’t find one dull moment in Bouchard’s pieces. He’s the right man at the right place!

“Perhaps the earliest sound O remembers noticing was the summer cicada. Later there was a dilemma — was the cicada biological or electrical? Where did it come from?” O is none other than John Oswald, and this quote appears early on in An Aparathentic Bio, an autobiographical memoir included in the package containing a compact disc featuring a most extraordinary, imaginative, and intelligent work of sonic art. (Indeed, I could continue with a whole series of alliterative i-words to describe the qualities of the CD: inspired, inquisitive, intimate, inviting, involving, illuminating, informing, and on and on.) When I call it a package, I don’t mean it’s packaging in the commercial sense. Sure, it has an appealing cover design. But that, too, is part of the completeness of the whole presentation. Not only is there one of Oswald’s inimitable (another i-word) photo-images on the exterior of the slide-in case, but there are also hidden images inside the cover tube. The autobiographical notes are printed on the hard covers that protect the CD. And a folded three quarters of a meter-long sheet carries, in small print, two columns of text on each side of an interview where John Oswald discusses in great detail the making and contents of the recording. Nothing of the above is window- dressing. Oswald’s work is never compartmentalized. Every aspect of research, preparation, realization, and presentation is part of a whole. So, when he writes about O’s curiosity about the cicada; or how O explored the innards of a transistor radio to understand its secrets; or how O experimented with the variable speeds of a phonograph and of reel-to-reel tape recorders; Oswald suggests to the reader that intimate involvement (yes, the i-words) with the reality of sounds and their sources is the foundation of any true musical experience. He invites (i-word!) the reader to enter into O’s world, where what appears to be simple and mundane will eventually emerge as intricate (another i-word) and even quite miraculous. Mind you, the music on the CD can be enjoyed without knowing anything about its maker and makings. Its sounds are organized so sensitively, elegantly, and competently, that their pure physicality draws the listener into the soundscape, and holds her or him there until the almost inaudible fadeout which brings both of the pieces on the disc to a close. Any attempt to describe the pieces in the framework of a brief review is doomed to failure. The parting points for the pieces are the most elementary tunings known to anybody with even the most cursory interest in sonic reality. The first Aparanthesi is based on the frequency 440 Hz — the fundamental tuning tone (named ‘A’) of the Western musical system. For the second aporanthesi Oswald chose the North American electrical standard, 60 Hz as its tuning base. As a plain sine tone, or a piano or cello sound (the only two “conventional” instruments employed), their choice may appear utterly mundane. But the commonality disappears when Oswald exploits the numerous variables underwhich these materials can be exhibited. For instance, there is a delicate but definite difference between hearing the piano range’s eight As as struck on the keyboard, and as they are modulated from a single-source A. Oswald describes one of his processes where the eighty-eight keys of a piano are all tuned to one A (“which sounds like a three-inch long guitar”). By “pitching up” or “pitching down” each of the eighty-eight keys one can imagine a “virtual” grand piano that can grow from its initial length of just ten inches to a monster of over one hundred feet. Not only does Oswald tune the sine, piano, and cello tones to the basic pitch (or its multiples) of the piece, but he does the same with the sounds of thunder, birds, foghorns, and cattle. But it is not just the choice of the sounds — synthetic, instrumental, and of nature — that makes listening to the two Aparanthesi such a special experience; it is also John Oswald’s ability to handle the fadings in and out, the blendings and unblendings, and the spacings and timings of the various materials and their combinations with exquisite taste and acoustic sensitivity. In other words, it is the supreme artistry of John Oswald that gives Aparanthesi its uniquely special quality. I suggested earlier that listening to this CD is thoroughly enjoyable even without reading any of the texts included in the package. (By the way, the package is bilingual: An Aparathentic Bio is in French, the interview in English. Nevertheless, much is to be gained by taking time and with O’s formative years and his personality through his own words. It is not an autobiography like most. It is not about “Look what I have achieved”; it is about “Look — everything, even the smallest, the simplest, is interesting.” And the three-meters-long transcript of the descriptive interview provides a wonderful guide to the listener on how to become an informed partner of a musical process from its genesis in the researcher’s mind to the final consummation in the listener’s ear. Every serious music student should spend hours (and days) with Aparanthesi. Elsewhere in this issue of Musicworks I suggest that we are at the end of an era of musical development in Western culture, and that a new era is in the primal stage of its making. If the clarity of mind, intellectual discipline, and aural sensitivity that went into the process of the production of Aparanthesi is an indication of the direction music of the twenty-first century will take, the future is bright.

Résultant d’un séjour de cinq ans dans le Midwest américain, les Migrations de Stéphane Roy sont une invitation au voyage. Utilisant des photos sonores de la mosaïque montréalaise, recueillies durant des promenades urbaines, Roy les transforme en studio pour émariciper la sonorité, pour en dégager la poésie abstraite. Même ses titres sont des chefs d’œuvre de poésie (Micro-confidences, Pythaghorizons). Cette plongée dans l’inouï est absolument étrange et fascinante.

Il aura fallu quatre ans pour que Tomas Jirku et le label No Type se décident à sortir ces morceaux calmes et hypnotiques qu’on découvre aujourd’hui sur Bleak 1999. Le disque n’a cependant rien d’un fond de tiroir. S’il apparaît chronologiquement comme le cinquième long format de ce jeune Canadien d’origine tchèque, il est en fait le tout premier qu’il ait réalisé, mais celui-ci était resté jusqu’ici non-diffusé. Depuis cet enregistrement, Tomas Jirku s’est montré plutôt productif et inspiré; laissant trace de sa créativité sur des labels tels que Intr_version, Force Inc ou Tigerbeat6; la plupart du temps dans une veine minimale et profonde. La musique de Bleak 1999 se déploie aujourd’hui comme suspendue hors du temps. On imagine facilement Tomas Jirku être tombé dans des transes profondes au cours des sessions d’enregistrement; comme pris dans les pièges qu’il pensait nous tendre. Les sonorités qu’on retrouve sont froides et plutôt sombres mais il règne une chaleur bien particulière dans laquelle on aura vite fait de reconnaître une âme. Au fil de l’écoute, les sons finissent par se confondre pour faire place à la seule force de l’atmosphère. Des fréquences-radio perdues se mêlent à des mélodies tout juste perceptibles, de petits clicks s’agitent sous les nappes et les beats détournent l’attention. L’amateur de références se plaira sûrement à décrire les affinités de cette musique avec celles de Pole, Mitchell Akiyama, Pan sonic, Deadbeat ou encore les accents les plus ambient de Plastikman, mais les descriptions les plus parlantes seront probablement celles des paysages mentaux que chacun explorera…

À l’intérieur du disque, Books on Tape s’amuse à énumérer les groupes qui ont influencé sa musique: Pavement, Talking Heads, Albert Ayler, Sonic Youth, Sun Ra, Wire, Lee Scratch Perry, Neil Young, Mike Patton… et la liste continue sans faute de goût… Mais contrairement à ce que l’on pourrait imaginer, Books on Tape se laisse aller sur des terrains privilégiant l’électro plutôt que le rock. Les instrumentaux présentés offrent un fort caractère ludique mélant souplesse et liberté. Chaque thème est une peinture des humeurs de l’auteur et les couleurs employées vont de la noirceur de l’electro-dub à la chatoyante mélodie simpliste et efficace de quelques notes bien pensées sans oublier les traits rythmiques du style cher au mouvement ‘big beat’. Sings the Blues parvient à tirer son épingle du jeu grâce à une approche musicale sans complexe et directe. 14/20

Quant on regarde la bio de ce jeune canadien, on est impressionné par le nombre et la qualité des labels avec lesquelles il a collaboré, Force Inc, Alien8/Substractif, Intr_version, Klang Elektronik pour n’en cité que quelques uns.

C’est sur le non moins renommé No Type que paraît Bleak 1999, la cinquième réalisation personnelle de Jirku. Oscillant entre ambient electronica et manipulations sonores, on ne décèle aucune agressivité dans cette musique, on est plutôt intrigué par l’évolution très aérienne de certains morceaux. Le travail de production semble aussi très intéressant, mélangeant les sources, répetitives ou non, s’appuyant sur différents effets et modulations, Tomas Jirku crée un univers intriguant et mélodieux. L’utilisation des beats sera toujours utilisé à sa juste valeur, breakbeat minimal qui laisse respirer les différents arrangements ou au contraire, rythmes plus abstraits qui les appuis.

Un album qui n’a en tout cas, en référence au titre, rien de «lugubre», si ce n’est peut-être par rapport à l’état d’esprit dans lequel il a été conçu. Mélancolique ou rêveur serait le plus approprié. 3/5